He doesn't seem...

The last two grafs in Friday's coverage of ex-governor Blagojevich in The Bright One: "One teen posed for a photo with Blagojevich to capture the history. 'He doesn't seem like a total douche,' the teen remarked after the former governor passed."

Extra

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Good for the Serbians?

Exeunt left, pursued by history

Newcity 411's battle of the tabs

It gets curiouser and curioser in that publishing town. "Sources who attended Monday night's meeting of the Sun-Times' chapter of the newspaper guild say that, unsurprisingly, the union seems to have little information and even less power in the face of an impending cut of another seven percent in wages and benefits and rumors of outsourcing copy-editing to India," an unbylined piece in Newcity reports. ".A strike against the on-life-support newspaper would likely kill the publication, leaving the union only with grievance-filing in its toolbox, and even that means little if the publication doesn't survive. The Tribune, smelling blood, announced Tuesday that it was converting its newsstand product to a tabloid, in a move that seems to be a clear attempt at placing the dagger directly in the Sun-Times heart. Sun-Times staffers related details about Monday night's convocation of union members of the editorial department, including writers, columnists, copyeditors, photographers, designers and some web workers. Union reps told members the proposed pay cuts would not save jobs and working fewer hours did not appear to be an option. The issue of severance arose, and a lawyer explained that fired copy editors would likely get severance, but if the company folds it's not clear if employees would still receive that benefit. Members militated about alerting the general public about the threat of outsourcing, and picketing was discussed." The tab starts Monday: a side benefit to presses already churning out Red Eye, TribCo's tabloid free-fluffer. Wonder if the layout will be the same?

NY Times' Holland Cotter on his critical path at CJR

"So conveying your experience is almost as important as giving an opinion?" "I think that’s true. My favorite critics are not art critics, but dance critics. Especially Edwin Denby. I like to read them best—not for stylistic reasons, but because the subject they are writing about is a very ephemeral thing. It basically doesn’t exist beyond the performance. The only record is what you write about it, with the kind of language that captures it on the fly. I think of art the same way. There is no objective perspective on it that makes sense to me, really. We’re here for a very short time. We’re here together. We won’t be here very long. The experience is so personal, so fleeting, that I just want to capture it."

The future of journamalism

What great theater should be

Rally for Gaza, Dearborn Street, around 430pm Friday.

I think it would be fun to run a newspaper

"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."

"Slumdog copyeditors": Michael Miner on the Sun-Times outsource scheme

There's more to the story, but here's Michael Miner on the Chicago Reader website about an unlikely scheme to slow the death of the Chicago Sun-Times: "On Wednesday, the Sun-Times Media Group, at a meeting in the Sun-Times led by CEO Cyrus Freidheim Jr., told their unions they needed to cut their overall wage and benefit packages by 7 percent; they asked the unions to come up with ways to do it. The Sun-Times unit of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which represents editorial employees at several of the papers, will meet Monday evening to discuss the issue. Sure to be on the agenda too is an idea the company floated Friday afternoon at the Sun-Times. It's to eliminate 25 to 30 jobs -- about a fifth of the editorial jobs remaining at that paper -- by outsourcing the copy editing and layout functions, possibly to India." [More at the link.]

Is there really a monster in this box?

You are young pizza by slice

Metal boxes ready for recycling when the presses are no longer oiled and inked.

The bright one

Michael Ventura on "The Talent of the Room"

People who are young at writing — and this does not necessarily mean they’re young in years — ask me, now and again, if I can tell them something useful about the task. Task is my word, not theirs, and it may seem a harsh and formal word, but before writing is anything else it’s a task. Only gradually do you learn enough for it to become a craft. (As for whether writing becomes your art — that isn’t really up to you. The art can be there in the beginning, before you know a thing, or it may never be there no matter what you learn.) “The only thing you really need,” I tell these people, “is the talent of the room. Unless you have that, your other talents are worthless.” Writing is something you do alone in a room. Copy that sentence and put it on your wall because there’s no way to exaggerate or overemphasize this fact. It’s the most important thing to remember if you want to be a writer. Writing is something you do alone in a room.

"The Talent of the Room," Michael Ventura

Thumbsuckering: Louis Menand on the VOICE in The New Yorker

In a diverting but hasty survey of the history of the Village Voice over its decades on the streets (and sometimes on the ropes), Louis Menand hastily sums up: "The Murdoch purchase did not end the Voice's distinctiveness. It was a durable brand. Of course, the paper will share the fate of every other print medium in the digital age, whatever fate that is. Still, more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the internet does now long before there was an internet. The Voice was the blogosphere... and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium. It opened up an insecure and defensively self-important profession. Until its own success made it irresistable to buyers who imagined that they could do better with a busisnes paln than its founders had done from desperation and instinct, it had the courage to live by its wits." While the article does not mention the present straits of its current owner, nor its New Years Eve firing of 50-year-veteran Nat Hentoff, the fairly banal summation graf has the backhanded felicity of only implying the sad situation of many journalistic institutions today, bled or wracked by buccaneers enabled by bankers who haven't an ounce of ink in their veins.

Brian Eno on "the feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse," from EDGE

As one of the luminary respondents at the Edge Foundation's question of the year "What will change everything?", Brian Eno considers"the feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse." "What would change everything is not even a thought. It's more of a feeling. Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better. The world was rich compared to its human population; there were new lands to conquer, new thoughts to nurture, and new resources to fuel it all. The great migrations of human history grew from the feeling that there was a better place, and the institutions of civilisation grew out of the feeling that checks on pure individual selfishness would produce a better world for everyone involved in the long term. What if this feeling changes? What if it comes to feel like there isn't a long term—or not one to look forward to? What if, instead of feeling that we are standing at the edge of a wild new continent full of promise and hazard, we start to feel that we're on an overcrowded lifeboat in hostile waters, fighting to stay on board, prepared to kill for the last scraps of food and water? Many of us grew up among the reverberations of the 1960's. At that time there was a feeling that the world could be a better place, and that our responsibility was to make it real by living it. Why did this take root? Probably because there was new wealth around, a new unifying mass culture, and a newly empowered generation whose life experience was that the graph could only point 'up'. In many ways their idealism paid off: the better results remain with us today, surfacing, for example, in the wiki-ised world of ideas-sharing of which this conversation is a part. But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the future world not in that way but instead as something more closely resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in Cormac McCarthy's post-cataclysm novel 'The Road.' What happens then?

The following: Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands. Big institutions, because they operate on longer time-scales and require structures of social trust, don't cohere. There isn't time for them. Long term projects are abandoned—their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned—not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits. Any kind of social or global mobility is seen as a threat and harshly resisted. Freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control. Survivalism rules. Might will be right. This is a dark thought, but one to keep an eye on. Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place. They can take hold quickly and run out of control ('FIRE!') and by their nature tend to be self-fueling. If our world becomes gripped by this particular feeling, everything it presupposes could soon become true." [Other respondents include Stewart Brand, Verena Huber-Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Terence Koh, Kai Krause, Ian McEwan, P.Z. Myers, Monica Narula, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.]